Visual Tooltip

Visual Tooltip is a simple application that creates a dock-like task bar on your screen, providing a different way to manage the running programs.

The program boasts an impressive settings menu, with tons of options, all of them concerning the look of the task bar.

You can thus configure the minimal size of the thumbnails, the background, which can be either colored or transparent, show border, show window title and set up thumbnail display animation.

You can choose to place automatically all thumbnails in the dock, configure space between thumbnails and even show a progress bar whenever you're performing an action such as copy or download.

While the look of the newly-created dock-like task bar is more or less decent, not the same thing can be said about the performance on a Windows 7 workstation.

The bar is terribly slow and you can't even move it on the screen because the thumbnails need at least a few seconds to reach the new position. Still, Visual Tooltip worked okay on Windows XP, with just a minimal footprint on computer resources.

Visual Tooltip is far from what you may expect when hearing about a dock-like taskbar utility.

Truth is, it can prove to be quite handy, but in most cases this kind of applications rely on an eye-candy interface and highly-customizable tools. This time however, Visual Tooltip fails to impress, not only from the point of view of its look, but also because of the performance it provides when loaded on a Windows 7 workstation.